Success Matters: Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq"

Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University Political Science Faculty Publications Department of Political Science Winter 2006 Success Matters: Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq" Jason Reifler Georgia State University, [email protected] Christopher Gelpi Peter Feaver Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/political_science_facpub Part of the Political Science Commons Recommended Citation Reifler, Jason; Gelpi, Christopher; and Feaver, Peter, "Success Matters: Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq"" (2006). Political Science Faculty Publications. 10. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/political_science_facpub/10 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Political Science at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Political Science Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Success Matters Success Matters Christopher Gelpi, Peter D. Feaver, and Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq Jason Reiºer Since the Vietnam War, policymakers have worried that the U.S. public will support military operations only if the human costs of the war, as measured in combat casualties, are minimal.1 A combination of circumstances makes the public response to the ongoing war in Iraq during the presidential campaign of 2003–04 an important opportunity to evaluate this hypothesis. First, the war in Iraq is both the most controversial and most deadly U.S. military operation since the Vietnam War. By Election Day in November 2004, nearly 1,200 U.S. soldiers had been killed in action. At the same time, Americans seemed increasingly divided over Pres- ident George W. Bush’s reasons for going to war; both the Kay report and the 9/11 commission report raised questions about the strength of the ties between Saddam Hussein, weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and the al-Qaida terrorist network.2 Moreover, the public was deluged with information about the Christopher Gelpi is Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University. Peter D. Feaver, Alexander F. Hehmeyer Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Duke University, is on leave and serving as Special Adviser for Strategic Planning and Institutional Reform on the National Security Council staff. This article reºects his personal views from work he did before joining the government and does not repre- sent the ofªcial position of the U.S. government or the George W. Bush administration. Jason Reiºer is As- sistant Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Chicago. The authors would like to thank the participants in the Wielding American Power: Managing In- terventions after September 11 project at the Triangle Institute for Security Studies and the Terry Sanford Institute for Public Policy at Duke University for their helpful comments in shaping this work. Moreover, they would like to thank John Aldrich, Bear Braumoller, John Brehm, Claudia Deane, Alexander Downes, Joseph Grieco, Bruce Jentleson, Robert Keohane, Steven Kull, Eric Larson, Charles Lipson, John Mueller, Janet Newcity, Emerson Niou, Robert Pape, and two anony- mous reviewers for their helpful comments on the manuscript or the survey instruments. This re- search was supported by grants from the Carnegie Corporation and the National Science Foundation. 1. Unless otherwise noted, we use the term “casualties” to refer to “deaths.” We recognize that in military parlance, casualties means dead and wounded, a much higher number in any conºict. In popular usage, however, the word “casualties” has generally meant those who died while per- forming their mission. In our own polling, except where noted, we used “deaths” in all relevant question wordings so our claims are not contaminated by any public confusion about the terms. In this article we look only at one aspect of the cost equation—”U.S. military deaths in combat,” or “our casualties.” 2. The Kay report is not ofªcially published in any single document. David Kay submitted an in- terim report from the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intel- ligence, the House Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Defense, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, on October 2, 2003, but he resigned prior to submitting a ªnal report. His most inºuential public statement on the ISG’s ªndings was his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee on January 28, 2004, following his decision to resign from the ISG. For a transcript of Kay’s October 2, 2003, testimony, see http://cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/speeches/ International Security, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Winter 2005/06), pp. 7–46 © 2006 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 7 International Security 30:3 8 war and its cost in American lives. Combat in Iraq was the most covered story on the major network television news broadcasts in 2004 with nearly twice as many minutes of airtime as the second most covered story: postwar recon- struction of Iraq.3 In this article, we argue that the public will tolerate signiªcant numbers of U.S. combat casualties under certain circumstances. To be sure, the public is not indifferent to the human costs of American foreign policy, but casualties have not by themselves driven public attitudes toward the Iraq war, and mounting casualties have not always produced a reduction in public support. The Iraq case suggests that under the right conditions, the public will continue to support military operations even when they come with a relatively high human cost. Our core argument is that the U.S. public’s tolerance for the human costs of war is primarily shaped by the intersection of two crucial attitudes: beliefs about the rightness or wrongness of the war, and beliefs about a war’s likely success. The impact of each attitude depends upon the other. Ultimately, however, we ªnd that beliefs about the likelihood of success matter most in deter- mining the public’s willingness to tolerate U.S. military deaths in combat. Our ªndings imply that the U.S. public makes reasoned and reasonable judgments about an issue as emotionally charged and politically polarizing as ªghting a war. Indeed, the public forms its attitudes regarding support for the war in Iraq in exactly the way one should hope they would: weighing the costs and beneªts. U.S. military casualties stand as a cost of war, but they are a cost that the public is willing to pay if it thinks the initial decision to launch the war was correct, and if it thinks that the United States will prevail. We explore the public’s tolerance for casualties through a close examination of polling data from the beginning of the Iraq war through the 2004 U.S. election—that is, for the ªrst twenty months of the war. Of course, the Iraq war has continued since, and by the winter of 2005, U.S. public opinion on the war had shifted somewhat. Consider just one, oft-quoted statistic: in April 2003 at the height of “major combat operations,” 76 percent of the public approved of 2003/david_kay_10022003.html. For a transcript of Kay’s January 28, 2004, testimony, see http:// www.ceip.org/ªles/projects/npp/pdf/Iraq/kaytestimony.pdf. For a complete review of the con- troversy over Iraqi WMD programs leading up to the Iraq war, see http://www.gwu.edu/ ~nsarchiv/index.html. See The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004). 3. For the Tyndall Report summary of 2004 campaign coverage, see http://www.tyndallreport .com. Success Matters 9 President Bush’s handling of the war; by the time of the U.S. election in November 2004, that number had dropped to 47 percent; a year later, it had dropped below 35 percent.4 This movement in public opinion in a conºict that remains ongoing as this article goes to press might lead some to discount an argument tested primarily on data from the ªrst twenty months of the war. Dismissing our ªndings in this way is unwarranted for at least two reasons. First, this article is advancing a model of the structure of public opinion, not simply describing the relatively high level of public support that existed in certain stages of the war. Our model can be assessed based on twenty months of data and then, if supported, applied to new data as they come available. We believe that the noticeable decline in public support in 2005 ªts our model rather well. In our view, public support has not eroded in 2005 because of mounting casualties per se. After all, the United States suffered about the same number of casualties between March and July 2005—a period of marked decline in support—as it did during the months from June through October 2004—when support was on the rise. Support hit a peak, moreover, in January 2005 despite large numbers of U.S. casualties in November and December 2004. Instead, we believe that the decline in public support for the war reºects the mounting death toll combined with a perceived lack of measurable progress toward “success” that eroded the public’s hopes that the war may eventually be won. Public support for the war in January 2005 clearly reºected public optimism in the wake of the strikingly successful Iraqi election that month. Since that time, however, we would argue that political deadlock over the drafting of a constitution, a lack of demonstra- ble progress regarding the efªcacy of Iraqi security forces, and the persistence of deadly attacks by insurgents undermined that optimism. Of course, the re- sults of the October 15, 2005, referendum on the Iraqi constitution and the sub- sequent national election will also need to be factored into the mix.

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